If the Great Library’s Obscurists and those lion automata hooked you, you’ll love how Foundryside turns “written commands” into reality-hacking magic. Sancia’s crew pulls heists in a city ruled by merchant-houses that hoard arcane knowledge—much like the Archivist’s stranglehold. As Sancia learns to subvert scrived objects the way Jess skirts Library rules, the stakes escalate into explosive confrontations over who gets to control the very language that powers the world.

If you were riveted by the Archivist’s back-room deals, Scholar Wolfe’s precarious position, and the way factional power decides who lives or burns, The Traitor Baru Cormorant goes even deeper. Watching Baru infiltrate an imperial bureaucracy to outmaneuver governors and bankers echoes the covert maneuvers around the Black Archives—only here every ledger entry is a weapon and every alliance a trap.

If the Library’s surveillance, book-burning raids, and brutal enforcement on Jess and his fellow postulants grabbed you, The Bone Season offers a similarly suffocating regime. Paige Mahoney navigates a city where clandestine powers police forbidden abilities—much like Morgan’s dangerous gifts—and every secret text or training session could mean imprisonment or worse.

If the interleaved letters and memoranda—those chilling notices from the Archivist and reports on burnings—made Ink and Bone feel alive, Illuminae turns that dossier style into a breathless ride. Redacted files, IM chats, medical logs, and AI transcripts piece together conspiracies the way Library missives do, pulling you through shocking reveals with the urgency of a forbidden dispatch.

If you connected with Jess Brightwell’s life as a book smuggler torn between loyalty and conscience—and the way his cohort bends rules under Wolfe and Santi—Six of Crows delivers a crew of gloriously gray operators. Kaz Brekker’s team pulls a near-impossible job where trust is scarce, motives are murky, and every choice cuts like the Library’s tests that pitted classmates against each other.